With work ranging from Drawing to painting, installation and intricately laboured Objet d’art, Nick Fox’s practice is Informed by disperate and sometimes contradictory reference points and layers of meaning, including Neo classical painting, Victorian visual culture, literature, craft, pornography and subcultural codes. Fox is partly inspired by Floriography, the Victorian cultural phenomenon which used flowers as tokens to communicate hidden or forbidden pleasures. He playfully exploits and reconfigures this Fin de siècle language, to construct double meanings and unsustainable utopias. These tropes are the vehicle through which Fox finds contemporary currency, personal symbol and cultural meaning of longing, seduction, desire and romance.

His mirror-like panels and laboured drawings are carefully built up over periods of up to 18 months, through a lengthy process of layering vaporous acrylic colour, the final presentation taking the form of dense tondo’s, or intricate hand cut objects resembling the presciousness of lace, the doily-like forms then folded, draped or presented in a vitrine.

Fox’s imaginary landscapes are seductive, luring the viewer ever deeper. Drawing on a vast bank of sources, Fox transforms the found taboo image and context (of photo-reproduction porn or fashion) into one of intimacy and emotive experience. Langorous male figures emerge from his sensual and craquelure surfaces while overlaid botanical imagery fuses a symbolic role to his themes of desire, longing and loss. These tantalising idylls and elusive narratives are often rendered in dark or overripe colour that, along with his painting process create a toxic fog, an Eden after the fall, one where innocence has been banished.